Ninety years after women won the vote, their hard earned place in the British economy is slipping away. And unless something is done to address it fast, women face being booted out of the workplace and back into the home.

As the number of people unemployed reaches almost 2m, the front pages are not dominated by striking women rising placards for fairer distribution of pay across the sexes, flexible working in tough times and protection of maternity rights. Instead they are filled with pictures of men at industrial plants, Honda car yards closed down and bankers losing their bonuses.

The face of this recession is not a woman's. It is already ingrained in my mind as a snow whipped man waving a laminated placard. But the 2.5% increase in the female redundancy rate in 2008 was double the rate of the male increase of 1.2% according to recent Trades Union Congress figures.

As women tend to work in smaller workplaces, redundancies go unnoticed by the media, and former bastions of working women are slipping back into the home at such a pace that the Female Eunuch might never have been written.

Just a fortnight ago the Sunday Times reported a new Prommies phenomenon: "professional mummies", who, due to dwindling business, City cutbacks and lay-offs, now find themselves at home with a new job description: mother. Sitting about waiting about for the economy to kick start, the lifestyle of this new brand of "super mum" didn't sound too bad. But this is not the reality for any but the super rich. Being a Prommie will mean poverty, frustration and an increasingly daunting gap between being a woman and the workplace.

Until now, international fiscal stimulation packages have shared the same face as the banner bearing strikers. Obama's promises to build roads, bridges and schools and invest in green technologies concentrate on construction and engineering industries where the fact is very few women are employed. It does not offer help to service sectors – nursing and teaching, for example – where more women are employed. Closer to home, Brown's concentration on rescuing ailing car plants and banks may later filter down to more women dominated industries such as retail, hospitality and smaller businesses later. But in the meantime these industries are going bust, leaving holes in the job market that are not being filled.

Women's minister Harriet Harman appears to be on the case. Yesterday evening she addressed the women's committee of the European Parliament, of which I am a member, with urgent pleas to make women's voices heard in this recession. Pursuing the equalities agenda is even more important now – as is keeping the impact of this recession on families and women at the forefront of politician's minds.

Our women's minister revealed, to the collected audience of MEPs representing women's interests from all around Europe, that in a recent polling of public attitudes in the recession, one-third of women say their lives have already been affected by the economic downturn. Harman said the poll revealed that more women than men report an increase in arguments in the home as a result of this recession – from which we can conclude that the economic downturn is affecting men's ears, or that women are bearing the brunt of financial cutbacks and renegotiating finances such as pocket money, school trips and shopping budgets, within the home.

Women's issues will gain prominence at April's G20, which will have its own section of speeches and debates between women ministers. But the same hard fought for employment rights that made it possible for women to combine a career with a family – flexible working, more maternity rights and part-time hours – are now the very things that are making some women vulnerable to desperate employers looking to cut costs, no matter how illegal this practice may be. Even back when the credit crunch sounded more like a cereal than a recession, business mogul Alan Sugar received wide ranging support for his opinion that the current equality laws are "counter-productive for women ... You're not allowed to ask [about planned pregnancies] so it's easy – just don't employ them [women]." Ominously he ended this ill-thought tirade with: "It will get harder to get a job as a woman."

Right now, women across Europe need newly devised policies aimed at protecting them from from unfair job losses. They need legislative and fiscal crampons of protection and more money for training to keep their toehold in the economic landslide. If we do this, when the rubble clears women will still be there – and we will have the chance to rebuild sectors such as the finance industry, without the 40% pay gap between men and women and the culture of lap dancing.

As our sisters in Iceland and Norway are proving with a new female PM and 40% female representation on company boards, it may have been mainly men that got us into this problem, but its essential that women play a full part in getting us out.